


Odd Man Out

by cthulhuraejepsen



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 01:21:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5848462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhuraejepsen/pseuds/cthulhuraejepsen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man tries to reclaim his money. Written for /r/rational's weekly challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Odd Man Out

“I want my fucking money!” screamed a voice from the other side of the door. The guy was banging against the metal hard enough that he had to be doing some damage to his knuckles. Unfortunately, a cursory analysis of his behavior showed that he was on that new drug that was making the rounds. The media were calling it a horse tranquilizer, but in typical media fashion they’d gotten it wrong; the horse tranquilizers were only a precursor. Jim thought of it as PCP-lite. It amped up aggression and made you feel like you were on top of the world, but you didn’t totally take leave of your senses.

Jim made a second check of the outside camera, then slid back the cuff port to take a look with his own eyes. The man locked eyes with Jim right away, but he wasn’t so out of it that he was about to try getting a hand through the small space that separated them.

“I want my fucking money!” the man screamed again. “Give me my fucking money!”

“Who are you?” asked Jim. Facial recognition had already got an ID, but it was better to get secondary verification; this whole conversation was going into the files.

“Harry Kramer,” said the man. “You have my fucking money.”

“Computer says you deposited with us,” said Jim. “Computer says you signed a contract.”

“Yes!” said Harry. “Yes, fucking exactly, I did sign a fucking contract with you assholes, one that said you’d send me a shipment of electronics, whatever’s hot in twenty years time. So I go to the warehouse that I fucking specified, the one I took all those pictures of, got GPS coordinates and everything, and I sit around with my fucking thumb straight up my asshole, really jammed right up in there, and you fucks never delivered, so now, now I fucking want my fucking money!”

Jim sighed, partly because he had to deal like assholes like this every night and partly because he was hoping it would send Harry into another apoplectic fit. Harry just stood there though, seething and waiting for an explanation.

“We gave you a packet,” said Jim. “One that explained all this stuff.”

“Yeah, and it fucking said that I would get my shipment,” said Harry. He grabbed a piece of paper from out of his pocket and shoved it toward the port that separated them. His nicotine-yellowed fingernail pointed at a number that was circled in red, “99.99%”.

“It’s not a guarantee,” said Jim. In fact, just below the number, in small letters, the paper said as much. “What it means is that if we do ten thousand cycles, there’s going to be one timeline where you don’t get your shipment.”

“Bullshit!” shouted Harry. He looked like he was going to try kicking down the metal door between them. “You think I’m going to buy that I got screwed by a one in ten thousand chance?”

“That’s not how it works,” said Jim. It was easy to be patient with these people, especially when that only served to aggravate them. Jim had watched helpless people like this before; they came in during the night shift, more often than not, when they thought they’d be able to kick and scream their way into a concession. “There are a bunch of timelines out there. They all exist. So it’s not a matter of chance, there’s always going to be one version of you that pays us and gets nothing back. That’s the deal.”

“Yeah,” said Harry, like he understood that, “But I didn’t get my shit, so I want my goddamned money back.” His anger was visibly fading.

“We can’t give you your money back,” said Jim. “We’ve still got to wait twenty years then buy the electronics and send them back in time. Otherwise none of the other timelines come into existence, none of them get their shipment, and there was no point in you coming to us.”

“But there wasn’t a point!” cried Harry. “I didn’t get my shipment! It was supposed to be make me rich, to turn a thousand dollars into two hundred thousand!”

“It’s going to make some versions of you rich,” said Jim. “They were in your future when you signed that contract, but now they’re living alongside you, off in those other timelines. That was the gamble you were taking.”

“Fuck those guys,” said Harry. He was gritting his teeth. “You give me that money back, they never get to exist, right? Because you never send the electronics back to them?”

“Sure,” said Jim.

“So give me my money back,” said Harry. His lip was trembling. “Please, I can’t make rent without that money, I’m going to starve, my kids are going to starve, just issue a refund and we’ll … we’ll call it square, right?” He was coming down off his high fast now.

“We can’t do that,” said Jim. “That’s the whole point of the contract, the whole point of our business. We do the thing that you don’t have the willpower to do.”

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Harry.

“You thought that throwing one of you under the bus was worth it, if it made the other ninety thousand rich in the process,” said Jim. “You could have done the same thing we do by just saving the money and waiting twenty years, then buying the electronics yourself. You knew that you’d never make that sacrifice for those other potential guys though. You might make a commitment to do it, but after you saw that the electronics hadn’t arrived in the warehouse, you’d break that commitment. Or maybe you’d do what some other people do, which is to say ‘Well, alright, I’m going to just send it next Sunday, not today’, but when they don’t get a shipment from the future on Sunday, they push it back again, and never end up going through with it. So that’s why we exist. We don’t have a stake, so we just do whatever we were told to do. You make a commitment that you can’t unmake.”

“Shit,” said Harry. He looked crestfallen now, broken. Jim had liked it better when he was angry and swearing. “Shit, what am I going to do?”

“No idea,” said Jim. “Not really my problem.”

He slid the cuff port closed and sat back down in his chair. The conversation was logged; video was still writing to the disk as Harry gave the metal door a few feeble hits. When Harry started talking about his children, Jim muted the audio. It wasn’t the first time that he’d felt bad for one of the people who came knocking at the door during a night shift, but there was no way that he was going to risk his job to help someone who’d given himself the short end of the stick.


End file.
